Climate scientists look behind Chinese legend of dogs barking at the sun to learn why spring in southeast China is cloudy
- For centuries, people in southeastern China have accepted that spring in their part of the world is a long, cloudy period
- Team from China and Britain finds scientific evidence for link between Tibetan Plateau and East Asian circulation and precipitation
For centuries, people in southeastern China have accepted that spring in their part of the world is a long, cloudy period. Some ancient Chinese literature even reported perennial mountain clouds in the region.
But until recently the underlying causes of the seasonal phenomenon were not clear in the science community.
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Subtropical forests may have been on Tibetan Plateau 47 million years ago, Chinese scientists say
Now, a collaborative team from China and Britain says it has found that this climate may be influenced by the Tibetan Plateau.
“The Tang dynasty poet Liu Zongyuan wrote that the high mountains surrounding Sichuan blocked the sun so thoroughly that even the local dogs would bark wildly at the rare sight of it,” said Professor Li Jiandong, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), reported in the team’s paper on the subject
Liu’s writing was later accepted as a common wisdom and used by Chinese to describe a man who has seen little and regards many things as strange.
Li and his team at the academy, along with researchers from the Ministry of Natural Resources’ First Institute of Oceanography and the University of Exeter in Britain, found that the shape of the Tibetan Plateau was likely to be the real inspiration behind the legend.
Their work was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate last month.